Stillness Of The Night
by Vanilla Princess Baby
Summary: "It'd been two years. Two years since the game had ended. Two years since Toby and the girls had found Alex's underground bunker, found their tormentor and their best friend fighting over an axe, found Ezra with a crack in his skull. Two years since Toby had alone deciphered which twin was the crazed mastermind and which twin was the girl who owned his entire heart." Set Post 7x20.


**AN: Hi! So I wrote this actually last September. I fully intended it to be a oneshot but unfortunately I got stuck somewhere in the second part and realized it made a lot more sense to just split it in two anyway, as the storyline sort of shifts halfway through. I still don't have the second half done, but I figured why hold off on posting the first half? Haha.**

 **But seriously, I do feel the need to probably warn you that if you are an Ezria shipper who is dabbling in Spoby fanfiction, this is not the story for you. If you are a Spoby shipper who also hardcore ships Ezria, I advise you to proceed with caution. This first chapter has absolutely nothing to do with Ezria at all-in fact, I think they are scarcely even mentioned-but the second half focuses on Spencer and them in a very, very negative way and I just want to give you a clear warning that this is truly not a Ezra friendly story (though I did ship them once upon a time. . . prior to 4B, let's just say).**

 **Otherwise, I feel the need to maybe also throw out there that this is an extremely chaotic run-on-sentence style of writing I tried out and maybe it won't really work for you, maybe it'll be way too confusing, and I'm really, truly sorry if that's the case, but I started randomly writing without a plan-though the storyline in the first chapter is a more simplified version of a much more in-depth story I still have every intention of writing-and this is what came out.**

 **Anyways, I love all you out there who are reading this. You all mean the world to me and I hope you enjoy this fic and that you do comeback for more. Your never-ending support for everything I write really means more than I could ever even express. (I sound so cliche right now but all my author notes kind of sound cliche soooo I guess this is just me hahaha.)**

 **Oh and I basically forgot to even give you the time period this takes place in-though I hope it's apparent a few paragraphs in, hahaha. This is set after 7x20. And, if you didn't know, the title comes from the poem Spencer recited to Toby in the end of the finale. She didn't say the entire thing, but the poem's second to last line translates to the title of this fic.  
**

 **Thank you and enjoy! (:**

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An ordinary day is a rarity after spending years upon years living in constant fear of an unknown figure, an all-knowing tormentor, a ruthless, violent psychopath. Ordinary days are unexpected blessings that no one who had an average youth could possibly even begin to comprehend.

But unfortunately some didn't have the luxury of ignorance and were forced to bear the brunt of the past, forced to live every second of every day with skeletons and ghosts and demons and whispers all sitting at the threshold of their closet, begging to be unleashed, begging to be set free, begging to devour what was built in spite of the panic and the fear and the lingering anxiety that somehow, some way, it wasn't over, and somewhere out there in the dark that no one could see, the game was still happening.

Some days the trepidation was so debilitating, it incapacitated them from doing anything more strenuous than inhaling and exhaling from the comfort of their beds.

Spencer was one of those people. The stunning, brilliant brunette, who spent her entire young adulthood looking over her shoulder, flinching whenever a new text came, evading cops and parents and the boy with blue eyes that she loved more than her own life, always terrified of looking behind her on the off chance of finding sociopaths or stalkers or killers-or her own family-waiting, had lived a life that most people couldn't even stomach envisioning and somehow, by some miracle of strength and stamina, she managed not to let it destroy her completely.

It'd been two years. Two years since the game had officially ended. Two years since Toby and the girls and Caleb and Mona had all found Alex's underground bunker, found their tormentor and their best friend fighting over an axe, found Ezra with a crack in his skull. Two years since Toby had alone deciphered which twin was the crazed mastermind and which twin was the girl who owned his entire heart.

 _"Une orange sur la table._

 _Ta robe sur le tapis._

 _Et toi dans mon lit."_

Two years since Alex and Mary and Mona had all but evaporated into thin air. Two years since a cop came and took Alex away and never booked her into custody and never reported the incident and never told any authority figure that there laid a bunker underground, underneath a beautiful blue house that meant for a girl with mocha eyes but instead had been permanently marred by her twin.

In the two years since that night, the entire group had struggled and faltered and fell and rose and made leap and bounds and failed and succeeded, time and time again.

Emily and Alison had taken a trip to Paris, just ten weeks after the game ended. They intended to go for two weeks, ended up staying three months longer than anticipated and when they returned, instantly went to couple's therapy in order to save their marriage before it started. It worked but they still struggled, Spencer knew. Emily wanted to stay in Paris, stay away from Rosewood, stay in a foreign land where it felt like nothing that had happened in their nightmarish hometown could touch them. Alison though, the girl who stayed on the run for two years when she was nothing more than a child, demanded they return to Rosewood, demanded they raise their twins in the little disturbed town.

Spencer suspected that her cousin's reasons for wanting to stay had everything to do with the childhood she never got to have and the fantasy of what could have been. Alison, unlike all the other girls, lived in a daydream that Rosewood could be home, that the picturesque small town wasn't haunted or tainted or a living hell on Earth and that if they just stuck around long enough, if they just watched their girls grow up here, Emily would magically see the fog clear her eyes and would understand too, that this town wasn't the problem, they just never gave it a chance.

Alison also clung to the memory of her mother, with all ten fingers. She clung to the woman who many would describe as deplorable and deranged and bizarre beyond measure. And they'd be right, in Spencer's eyes. But the brunette also held more empathy for Ali than she would have when they were kids, as now she too understood what it was like to look at the woman who gave you life and wonder how you could feel so connected and drawn to someone who had done so many horrendous things. How you could forgive someone for committing unspeakable acts, just because they were your mother and for some inexplicable reason, you love them and they love you, in spite of everything else.

Leaving Rosewood would also mean leaving Jessica behind, leaving behind every good memory she ever had with her mom, leaving behind the illusion of what should have been, had her mom not been stolen from her too young.

Spencer never told Alison she understood, but when it was just the two of them, and a word or song or date referenced _mother_ , their eyes would meet and neither of them had to say a word to know what the other was thinking.

Hanna had her baby nine months to the day she told the girls she was pregnant. She had a beautiful, dark-haired, dark-eyed little boy named Jett Rivers. He was precious and hilarious and silly from the moment he entered the world. He had all of Caleb's looks and all of Hanna's personality. He lit up every room he was in and every heart in it.

He was so endearing and so breathtaking and magnificent that Hanna forgot for nearly an entire twenty-four hours after giving birth that she should be upset she didn't have the girl she had anticipated. She should have been disappointed that she lost her own bet, but one look into her little boy's big, brown eyes and all she could feel was unequivocal happiness for the miracle she and Caleb had created.

Spencer, on the other hand, had gone through waves upon waves of emotional wreckage since that night when she was finally free from her tormenter, her kidnapper, her twin sister, once and for all.

The moment she'd recited the French poem to her beloved boy, the moment he knew who was Spencer and who was Alex, the moment their eyes locked and then, seconds later, their bodies, both of them felt their hearts became whole once again.

They clung to each other for days afterwards. He'd led her out of the prison she'd narrowly escaped and carried her into the hospital, as her limbs had lost all feeling, and sat by her bedside as a doctor checked her out. The man in the white coat had prodded the couple with questions of what exactly happened before insisting that they needed to call and report this to the police immediately.

But the cops already knew, both Spencer and Toby thought, and the last thing either of them wanted was to have to deal with another string of a dozen questions, so they insisted that they would go to the station for statements whenever called in, but Spencer pled that she just wanted to rest and the doctor saw the exhaustion and the despair in her eyes and he saw the boy anxiously squeezing her hand and signed off on the release papers.

Toby kissed her gently and whispered her name like it was a prayer and once she was signed out, he drove her to his apartment in Philly, curtsey of her brother Jason, and they quickly and shockingly easily fell asleep like not one day had passed since the first night they fell in love.

The days that followed they didn't leave each other's sides and Spencer didn't even want to get out of bed and Toby called sick into work, stating he had come down with something real nasty and he felt terrible but he just couldn't make it into work today.

They laid in bed and stroked each other's faces with feather light fingertips and whispered secrets and confessions and promises and words no one else had ever heard.

 _"I have loved you every day of my life since we were sixteen."_

 _"You were the best thing that ever happened in my life."_

 _"I have missed you in ways I can't even describe."_

 _"Sometimes I would pretend she was you."_

 _"I used to dream that you were the one asleep with me and wake up crying."_

 _"You're my angel."_

 _"Nothing else ever measured up."_

And as the days turned to night and then back to day again, they moved towards the living room and the kitchen and newer, uglier, darker confessions came out.

 _"I knew she wasn't you but I wished it, I wished it to be true so badly. I wished you had come back to me."_

 _"When she told me she'd tricked you, I felt like it was my fault. I felt like I'd failed you."_

 _"The next time I saw you after she tricked me in the cabin and you acted like nothing had happened, I thought I was getting the brush off. I thought you didn't just want me. That being with me was a mistake."_

 _"Every time I saw you, all I could think about was Yvonne and her ring and how much you loved her and I thought that you didn't love me anymore. Not the same way you had."_

 _"I killed Yvonne. I ran the car into a tree and killed her and the worst part is, when I woke up, my first thought was you. When Aria told me you got shot, for a second I forgot about her and I haven't forgiven myself for that since."_

 _"It wasn't until Alex said that you still loved me that I realized I wasn't making it up in my head, I wasn't just seeing what I wanted to see, that your feelings for me might still be there."_

 _"It wasn't until I saw your word on the Scrabble board that I realized you didn't know. I thought it was you who kissed me and who made love to me and I couldn't even comprehend how you didn't know how much I loved you. How much I've always loved you."_

They whispered things to each other, laying side by side on the futon, in their bed, on the carpet with the lights off and only the sun's natural light shining in the tiny apartment, unable to get their fill of each other's faces, their voices, their hands and their skin and their scent. All things they'd been deprived of, things they'd deprived _themselves_ of, in fear of rejection and heartache and destroying the other's happiness.

Mere days after they got back together, their relationship was stronger than it had been in years, than it had been long before the pregnancy scare and the distance and their own insecurities and fears drove a wedge the size of the Atlantic between them.

They attended Ezra and Aria's wedding and held hands and stroked each other's faces and drank overly expensive champagne–courtesy of Dianne Fitzgerald–and kissed sloppily in front of everyone and whispered honest words in each other's ears.

 _"You look so beautiful."_

 _"I want to peel that suit off you."_

 _"I can't get enough of your smell."_

 _"I like you drunk."_

 _"I love you so much."_

 _"Who in their right mind thought this wedding would ever happen?"_

 _"Who in their right mind let this wedding happen?"_

She'd giggled and held him tighter, despite their friends' smiles and shameless pointing. By the end of the night they were so happy and drunk and carelessly in love that they'd completely forgotten whose wedding they'd attended and shared one chair and kissed like no one was watching–and a lot of people, including Spencer's mother, were–and whispered more promises and danced some more.

 _"I love it when you laugh. You've never looked so beautiful as you do when you laugh."_

 _"I can't believe I'm here with you now."_

 _"I can't believe I ever let you go."_

 _"You're not a bad dancer at all."_

 _"That's because you're leading, babe."_

 _"I love your scruff."_

 _"I love how you feel in my arms."_

 _"Toby?"_

 _"Yeah?"_

 _"I'm gonna marry you someday."_

But the ups, the higher highs than either of them had ever felt, couldn't exist alone. You could never feel the completely unadulterated and pure white-hot joy they both felt without also experiencing the lowest of lows to go alongside it.

 _Almost_ the lowest of lows, that is.

Two months after the wedding Spencer started having a series of nightmares. At the beginning, they weren't any different from what she'd dreamt in her teen years.

There were black hoodies and break-ins and cops and murder raps and so much terror and so much rage and she woke up in a cold sweat with quivering limbs and tears cascading down her face and her only solace was Toby's very tired but very warm and concerned and loving arms.

 _"It's okay, baby."_

 _"I'm here."_

 _"It's over, Spence. They'll never touch you again."_

But soon the dreams turned more malevolent and she was being kidnapped and electrocuted and locked up inside her old bedroom and starved and beaten and tortured and isolated. Soon the dreams were being locked inside a glass cage and knowing that no one out there was missing her because no one even knew she was gone. Her life, her identity, her loved ones, everything that belonged to her was being stolen. Soon they even began to mingle with each other and with the night she found Toby's "body" in the woods.

When those dreams occurred, especially when they occurred all at once, she was gasping and screaming and hysterically crying and throwing up.

And Toby was there. He was always there. He was cradling her and kissing her and rocking her back and forth and holding her hair as her stomach lurched and whispering the same thing over and over again.

 _"It's over, Spencer. It's all over."_

But the nightmares were even worse when they belonged to him. When Toby's usually peaceful dreams got hijacked by Jenna and her manipulations and her clammy hands and long nails and thin dark hair and her threats. When she pulled his clothes off and swore if he told, she'd turn it all around.

 _"No one will ever believe freak Toby. Nobody likes freak Toby."_

 _"Not even your daddy likes freak Toby."_

 _"Not even your mommy liked you. That's why she's not here."_

The nights grew colder and darker as time went on and Jenna suddenly morphed into Alex and he was left powerless, knowing something was wrong, knowing he didn't want to do this anymore, but having to go through with it anyway.

The worst part was Spencer could never reciprocate his comfort. She could never make it better for him like he did for her.

Her heart broke in her chest as she reached for him, as she desperately wanted to hold him in her arms and tell him it was all okay.

But she shared a face with his tormenter now and he couldn't stand her touch on nights when these dreams occurred. He would cry and cover his face with his arm and scoot further to the edge of the bed, and when his rejection elicited her pain, when she busted up in loud tears because she couldn't help him and couldn't heal him and couldn't go back in time and protect him and couldn't even touch him, he began to sob in a way she didn't even know he was capable of.

And she walked out to the living room, still herself broken and bleeding and falling to pieces, and curled up in the fetal position on the couch and let her guttural cries for help match his.

The next morning, like clockwork, she would wake up to feel his lips on her sore, tear-stained face and feel him rub his nose against her's and cradle her in his arms and whisper how sorry he was and she never felt so much guilt in her entire life–not when she participated in Jenna's loss of sight or when Sara was electrocuted or when she covered up the murders of Shana and Rollins–as she did when he apologized for his own PTSD.

After five and a half months, Toby suggested they both see a therapist. She agreed but only if they did conjoined sessions.

The first session she'd barely spoke two words about what had happened to her and her friends. Toby had been radio-silent. They couldn't even meet the other one's eyes for hours after they went home.

But when they did, much to her utter astonishment, Toby was the one who cracked. He burst right as they were about to eat dinner and suddenly everything he'd ever bottled up imploded out of him.

 _"She used to follow me into the bathroom and sneak into my shower. I couldn't even make a noise or else she'd tell my dad that I was the one who followed her."_

 _"One time I got her to back off, I threatened to tell my dad and see who he really believed. The next day she burned me with her curling iron. She burned it into my skin and held it down and when her mom heard me scream, she started sobbing and said she was protecting herself from me. I got grounded for two months and they made me apologize."_

 _"I feel like I betrayed you. I feel like you'll one day realize how much of a gigantic screw-up I am for not even knowing I was sleeping with your twin."_

 _"My mom would be so disappointed in me right now. She'd be so ashamed of what I've done. What I let happen."_

She was at a complete loss as what to say to his completely heart-wrenching confessions. Her voice stalled in her throat and her chest ached and all she could do was sit on his lap and hold his head to the crook of her neck and kiss him until he stopped crying.

The next therapy session he uncharacteristically talked for nearly forty-seven minutes and she gladly sat by and held his hand and rubbed his back and listened as he let out every little thing impugning his psyche.

Thirteen minutes before the session ended Toby turned towards her, guilt suddenly overtaking his expression and insisted she take the floor.

But panic welled up inside of her and she shook her head and resisted her turn at speaking to the paid professional, who, alongside her boyfriend, stared at her unwaveringly, both of them waiting for her to spill her guts.

She couldn't force herself to speak the words her mind held captive. She couldn't open up, as much as she hated herself from the inside out for it.

That night in bed, after they'd made love, while he was kissing the back of her neck and hugging her from behind, she realized with suddenly clarity that he was free. There was a certain aura about him now, a newfound tranquil that he didn't exude before, and she realized he was closer to freedom than he'd been since Jenna had first come along and broken his already cracked spirit.

And she couldn't stand her own emotions in that moment. In that moment, she wanted to claw her own eyes out, for feeling even the slightest bit of jealousy towards him, for envying the release she so desperately wanted and so ferociously repelled against, for resenting him for doing what she was too cowardly to do.

He didn't need to be told what was happening inside her head. He could see it all over her face, in the way her mouth turned down and her breathing remained uneven and her eyes teared up and she couldn't stop staring at the ceiling or the wall.

And unsurprisingly, when the next day came around, she didn't want to get out of bed, didn't want to face the day, wanted to hide behind the covers and pretend this life wasn't her's. That the life she'd lived inside her memories was someone else's and she was just watching their movie or reading their book and any minute she chose she could turn it off, put it down and everything weighing on her would dissipate.

Except for him. He was the only thing in any life that she wouldn't give up. No matter how many hardships she endured, he was the one thing that made everything else worth it, that made everything okay.

He brought her breakfast in bed–her favorite, French toast and scrambled eyes and orange juice–and kissed her gently and rubbed her back and then dropped a bomb on her.

 _"I called Dr. Sullivan."_

 _"She's coming back into Rosewood next week."_

 _"Please go see her. Please, Spencer."_

And she's shaking her head and shaking it so rapidly and so furiously and blindly shoving away the tray of food he'd brought and she's trying to get away, but when he traps her in his arms she breaks and breaks and breaks and breaks so hard.

She'd gone to Sullivan alone, telling Toby she needed to do this on her own and he needed to go to work because they'd both been playing hooky too often and they need to maintain some semblance of a normal life.

The session was horrible and relieving and gut-wrenching and liberating, and when it was over and done with, she was never so grateful for her boy, who always pushed her to do what was right, who always put her needs above even his own.

The moment she left the therapy office and got into the car, she drove on autopilot straight to the drugstore down the street and before she really considered what she was doing, she was in her and Toby's apartment and she was staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, at the face that was no longer her own, that would always be associated with a sociopathic girl from the U.K.

And she did exactly what she had wanted to do since she saw her appearance, her exact face and body type and hair style all replicated back to her.

She pulled the hair dye out of her bag and within an hour her hair went from a chocolate brown to blue black.

But that wasn't even change enough and she pulled out her scissors from the top drawer and chopped her hair to three inches below her shoulders, right aligned with her bullet scar and thanked her instincts that she had decided not to trim her bangs for the last seven months.

Toby did a double take when he came home from work that night but when she timidly–a sight he rarely saw–walked closer to him, he merely smirked and took her into his arms and whispered " _beautiful"_ into her now black, curly hair.

They both went to their respective therapists, every week, consistently, for the next year and five months.

Within that year, they both began to heal, together as a couple and individually.

His nightmares got less and less frequent the more time he saw his therapist. Within six months of going, he was being bumped to once a month sessions. On the rare occasion he woke up, feeling violated and dirty and broken and stupid, he no longer rejected Spencer's comfort. Instead, he sought her arms. Now, whenever he woke up in a dazed frenzy, he reveled in the feeling of her body wrapped around his.

She suspected, despite his protests that it wasn't true, that her black and now completely one length hair, had a lot to do with it too. She no longer looked identical to the girl in his dreams.

It wasn't why she did it, but it made her feel validated nonetheless.

Her therapy on the other hand, didn't go so easy. Her sessions remained consistent with a twice a week fixed schedule. She cried herself out and often got stomach aches. She still didn't feel safe sharing anything she talked about, even with Toby, who she trusted implicitly.

"It's not that you don't trust him," Sullivan said when Spencer expressed guilt for not telling him more. "It's that you don't trust yourself."

She still had nightmares and still woke up in a whirlwind of hysteria and still instinctively sought refuge in Toby's very open arms. The fact that he was getting so much better and she was still falling apart at the seams brought her both great comfort and horrific guilt. When she apologized for being such a burden on him, during the days when she couldn't get out of bed and he had cancelled on work just to be with her, his words always remained the same.

 _"I love you no matter what."_

 _"I love you even if you think you're a mess."_

 _"I love you even if you can't love yourself."_

After seeing Dr. Sullivan for nine months straight at two regular appointments a week–excluding the emergency ones she had when her dark days were too bleak and Toby pushed her hair behind her ear and kissed the side of her neck and promised to hold her hand the entire time but insisted she just go in and sit on the couch and talk and cry and breathe and breathe and breathe–it was suggested she start taking some medication.

The subject brought tears of shame to Spencer's eyes and cut her vocal cords for the rest of the session and the entirety of the evening.

Toby knew not to push her but as they lay in bed, in the anonymity of night, both her legs sandwiched between his and her head on his chest, he couldn't say silent.

 _"It's nothing to be ashamed of, baby."_

 _"I don't want a pill to make me better. I should be able to do that on my own."_

 _"You used to be okay with the idea of taking sleeping pills."_

 _"It's different."_

 _"Spencer."_

 _"It's just different."_

 _"How?"_

 _"It just is."_

She took her first prescription—very warily and uncertain-seventeen days later, and within a week, she felt better, stronger, healthier than she had since she was just a kid, and once again she was wrapping her arms around Toby's neck and thanking God that he was always around to guide her in the right direction.

They both still had times though, when the black of night settled on their minds and avalanched every little sinister, haunting memory they had buried, repressed, forgotten in the back of their brains, and it was in those moments that everything felt futile, they had made no progress at all, the uphill battle would never be won, whatever life jacket they strapped on would never be able to hold them above water again because the darkness was back and it was going to swallow them whole.

But they persevered. They got up most days and he went to build houses with her half-brother-half-cousin and she went to Hollis Law School and then to the law firm she worked at with her mom-not-mother.

"We keep our jobs in the family," he teased her one morning, when they were cuddling on the carpet in the living room, lying in the space in front of the couch, staring up at the ceiling, watching the way the natural light from the window shone inside their apartment, bounced off the walls and hit the surface above them with impeccable force, creating shapes and shadows and rainbows and swirls and everything in life they both were blinded from seeing for nearly a decade.

They absolutely thrived in their individual areas.

She maintained a four-point-oh grade point average–thanks to Toby's help making flash cards and quizzing her until two twenty seven a.m and bringing her black coffee with three sugars and a vanilla protein drink every morning she had an exam–and she did an immaculate job on all the cases her mother assigned her and every other day she drove to The Lost Woods and went over room counts and customer complaints and took phone calls and filled out and filed all the paperwork herself.

Toby built house upon house upon house for homeless veterans in Philadelphia, each one better than the last. Women cried joy and men with badges and battle scars shook his hand and whispered _thank you_ with a gratitude that floored the carpenter and brought tears to Spencer's eyes because _this_ is how he always should have been treated and it killed her, it gnawed at her from the inside out, it aggrieved every atom of her body, because he deserved so much more than he had ever been given and only now he was finally receiving an inch of what he'd rightfully deserved all along.

After a year of living together in their small but cozy, bare but safe, simple but _them_ apartment, Toby started spending his nights in front of their kitchen table after dinner, sketching blueprint after blueprint, often times erasing and drawing and erasing and drawing and erasing and erasing and erasing again and again, until the paper ripped and he had to start all over from scratch.

 _"Babe, why are you getting so stressed about these blueprints?"_

 _"I just need them to be perfect."_

He wouldn't say anything more on the subject and she couldn't understand why, but when he started working late multiple times a week and brought home no extra money, she figured with his enormous heart and his pure, passionate nature that he'd met a veteran who'd touched his soul in a special way and he just wanted to do a flawless job, pro-bono, for the war hero that gave up a chunk of his soul to fight for the country.

But then her twenty-sixth birthday rolled around and he woke up her up just as the sun was rising and the sky was purple and pink and orange and red, all at once, shining through the cracks left between the branches and into their bedroom window, tossing rainbows onto their skin like pennies into a fountain. And he tugged at her arms and pulled her up and handed her his sweatshirt and pled for her to just come on, to just trust him, take his hand and follow him towards the door.

He drove her through quiet, peaceful neighborhoods she hadn't ever been to and past parks she wished she'd known about before. He didn't answer when she asked where they were going and only smirked when she said if she didn't have implicit trust in him, she would have guessed he was taking out to the woods to bash in her head and bury her body.

He didn't stop driving until they reached a lot that not long ago had been all grass and dirt and flowers for acres, as far as the eye could see.

Instead though, the once blank land now was home to a lavender two-story house, with a wraparound porch and white trim.

It was precisely detailed and unspeakably beautiful and the house she'd told him she'd always wanted, way back when they were seventeen and their future together was all a bright, shiny fantasy.

He stood there, measuring her reaction carefully, his eyes hopeful and nervous and insecure and she felt tears come to her eyes but for once they were tears of pure, unadulterated joy because no one had ever done anything like that for her before.

No one had ever loved her like that.

"Do you like it?" He asked, a smile forming its way onto his mouth, his hand still interlocked with her much smaller one.

"It's beautiful," was all she could muster, and she berated herself in the back of her mind for getting so easily choked up and instantly decided it was just because she was so tired and it was so early but she knew, deep down, it had nothing to do with sleep deprivation or her last intensive therapy session or the insane workload from her mother and the motel she was co-owned, and it really had everything to do with the blue-eyed angel who had built a house for her from scratch.

And when she believed nothing could make the moment any sweeter, he whispered in her ear, "I made it for you," the same words he uttered at seventeen, holding a wooden rocking chair in the bed of the truck she'd bought for him with the money from her sister's pawned ring.

It was only when she threw her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and thought this was heaven, this was what she never thought she'd have again, this was her second chance, this was her miracle, being with him, that she saw a second, smaller structure off to the side of her beautiful new house and instantly furrowed her brows and asked what else he built for her?

His baby blues lit up even brighter, if possible, and he carried her down the property as if she weighed nothing–because to him, she probably did–and it was only when she saw Bashful that she fully connected the dots and if she wasn't already in his arms, she would have tackled him to the ground.

 _"Happy Birthday, baby."_

But the good times couldn't last forever.


End file.
